“Illynor’s contact heard that there was a child inquiring about the Assassin, and she knew that the Guild will never turn down a new recruit. She sent out one of her barmaids to find me. When she presented me to Llorin,” Faye continues as they dart across the empty street, “I handed her the ten aurums I’d scrounged up in the market, told her my story, and asked her to kill my fiancé for what he did to my family. She took me up to her room, bought me food and drink, and walked out of the inn. When she returned five days later with my fiancé’s head in a basket, I told her I wanted to go to the Guild with her. I wanted to be able to rid the world of monsters like him—like your father.” She glances over her shoulder at him, frowning. “That’s why I saved you. Sometimes, I could see you through his eyes. I could see you screaming. I wanted to be the person to free you from that demon, just like Llorin was for me.”
“First Mercy, now me,” he muses. “You seem to have a soft spot for broken things.”
She doesn’t respond.
They shrink back into the shadows as a contingent of guards runs past, each one looking exhausted. He spots Kova and Tobias, two of the recruits he’d helped Master Oliver train not three years ago, in the middle of the group. The clanging of their armor fades as they round the corner, no doubt heading for the End.
He grabs Faye’s arm as she makes to step out of the alley. “I need to see someone.”
“You’re the most wanted criminal in the country, the city is crawling with guards eager to kill anyone who aided Firesse, and you want to make a house call?”
“Please. I just— Please. I can’t leave for the last time without seeing her.”
She sighs sharply through her nose. “Fine. Fine. Lead the way. But when I say we’re leaving, we’re leaving.”
A stone pings off Elise’s window. Then another. And another.
“That’s the fifth one you’ve thrown,” Faye hisses from her lookout at the mouth of the alley. “If she hasn’t answered by now, she’s never going to.”
“She will,” he snarls through clenched teeth. Another stone goes sailing through the air, glancing harmlessly off the glass. No answer. Not even a whisper of the curtains.
“Maybe she’s found a new lover to warm her bed while you’ve been away.”
He shoots her a sharp glare. She merely rolls her eyes and turns back toward the street. “Two minutes,” she warns.
He stomps around to the back of the house and grabs the key hidden in the planter beside the door. His heart thunders as he cracks the door open and peers inside, then slips into the dark, empty kitchen. Fool, he curses himself as his ears strain for the sounds of footfalls. Pathetic, lovesick fool. Faye is right—they should be fleeing the city now, getting as much distance between them and the dying king as possible. Ghyslain is dying. He’s certain of it. If not tonight, then he’ll pass into the Beyond the next day, or the next, and Tamriel will exhaust every resource to find the only man to blame for it—the man who had led the Cirisians straight to the heart of his country. But what Calum had told Faye is true: he could not leave his city, his country, forever without saying goodbye to the woman who had made it home for him.
The house appears completely empty as he creeps into the hall. Every room is dark, the curtains drawn, the candelabra unlit. Wherever they’d gone to weather the attack, they’d even taken Liri, their slave, with them. His heart sinks as he turns to leave. He cannot risk leaving a note, cannot risk someone finding out that he’d come to visit her, for fear that they’d dig deeper, discover the crimes they’d committed together. No—better to let her think he forgot about her, better to disappear entirely. In that one small way, at least, he can protect her one last time.
“Calum.”
His fingers—a mere inch from the doorknob—freeze at the sound of her father’s voice. He turns to find Pierce bearing down on him, his face twisted in wrath as he grabs the front of Calum’s shirt and shoves him against the door. Over the seren’s shoulder, Calum spies Nerida lingering under the archway, a trembling hand over her mouth.
“You have the gall to come here after what you’ve done?” Pierce roars, slamming him into the door again, so hard the cabinets rattle. “You dare show your face in my home after you took her from us, you lying, traitorous bastard?”
“Took her from you? What do you mean, took her from you?” Calum winces as Pierce’s fist presses against the wound he’d sustained in Xilor. Faye begins pounding on the opposite side of the door.
“It’s all your fault,” he hisses, his eyes filling with tears.
Panic consumes him, coiling in the pit of his stomach, wrapping around his throat as he chokes out, “What do you mean, took her from you? Where is Elise?”
“Lying at the bottom of an unmarked grave,” Pierce snarls. Behind him, Nerida begins to sob into her hands.
Calum’s blood runs cold. The world stops spinning. He manages to stammer a weak, “What?” as Pierce’s hands drop from his shirt. The seren takes a shuddering breath and steps back, clenching his fists as if to keep from strangling him.
“Elise is dead. The prince found the letters.”
“No.”
Faye shoves the door open. “Calum, we need to leave right now. I’m pretty sure half the neighborhood heard the shouting.”
He doesn’t move.
Elise.
Dead.
“I had to watch my daughter, my baby girl, die because of you,” Seren Pierce says in a low voice, every word hitting him like a punch to the gut. Calum would have preferred he keep yelling at him. He would have preferred death to the cruel, cold truth rolling off the seren’s tongue. “Because of your greed, because of your plotting, my Elise is rotting in the ground in a traitor’s grave. It should have been you.”
Behind him, Nerida begins to sob even harder.
Faye grabs his shoulder. He hardly even feels it. Everything within him has gone numb. “Calum, we need to go.” She pulls a dagger and levels it at Pierce, but the seren merely walks to the archway and wraps an arm around his wife’s shoulders.
“Take him away,” the seren says to her as tears fall down his cheeks. “Take him somewhere far, far away, where he can live the rest of his life knowing he was the one who sent my daughter to her grave. Take him somewhere the guards can’t find him, where he can live every day with the guilt of her death on his shoulders.” His gaze slides to Calum, full of contempt and pure, unadulterated hatred. “That’s what he deserves for stealing our daughter from us. Death at the end of a noose is not a good enough punishment.”
“I’m sorry,” Calum finally manages in a reed-thin, wavering voice. “I’m so sorry—”
He keeps saying it, over and over, as Faye drags him out of the house and out of the city.
The next thing he registers is a fist meeting his face. He rears back, his hand flying to his aching cheek, and blinks at Faye as she shoves a horse’s reins into his other hand.
“That was the only way I could get you to snap out of it,” she says unapologetically. He brushes his tongue across his teeth. “Nothing’s broken. You’ll have a nasty bruise and a black eye for a while, but you’ll be fine.”
They’re standing atop a grassy knoll, staring at the dark shadow of the city before them. How she’d managed to get him—numb, half-delirious with grief—out of Sandori is a Creator-dammed miracle, and a testament to her skill as an Assassin. He looks her over, the blood splattered across her shirt and crusted along the cuffs, which she had rolled up to her elbows. She scowls and picks at it, wrinkling her nose. “I couldn’t very well saunter through the gates with you blubbering like a baby beside me. I contemplated leaving you in an alley somewhere to choke on your own tears, but even I’m not that cruel.”
He doesn’t say a word. He simply turns to the chestnut stallion at his side and peers into the saddlebags. There isn’t much inside—a few changes of clothes, a dagger, a map, and a pouch of coins. The other one holds a couple pieces of bread, some fruit, and strips of dried meat. He looks
back at her. “Thank you,” he finally manages.
“You really loved her, didn’t you?”
He nods as he climbs onto the saddle, eager to leave the city, the memories of everything he has done and watched his father do, behind. They’ll never truly leave him, though. His sorrow is a living thing, a serpent coiled around his heart, squeezing tighter and tighter with each beat. Those words—It should have been you—have not stopped echoing, clanging around in his head. Pierce was right.
It should have been me.
He shoves the grief down, locks it away in that mental prison where Drake had kept him for so long.
“Where will you go?” the Assassin asks.
“Rivosa, maybe. Or Feyndara. Perhaps I’ll buy a boat and sail so far I’ll fall off the edge of the world. Let the darkness take me.” Just like it had so many times in the week leading up to the battle. Even though his father is gone, banished to whatever hell awaits monsters like him, the shadows, the scars on his soul, remain. “And you?”
She huffs a sharp, humorless laugh. “If it were just me, if Illynor and the rest of the Guild wouldn’t hunt me down wherever I went, perhaps I’d go with you. I fell out of love with them the day Illynor ordered me to kill an innocent person.” Her gaze drifts back toward the city, to the castle’s tall spires, the flecks of obsidian and gold shimmering under the sunset. “But I have someone else to save first.”
“Mercy?” His brows rise. “You don’t want to kill her?”
“I heard her scream when she saw that arrow flying toward the prince that day in Xilor. I’ve known her for ten years, and I’ve never heard her sound like that—like someone had reached into her chest and ripped her heart clean out. Until that day, I didn’t even think she had a heart.” Her lips spread into a half smile, but it quickly disappears. “I hated her for cheating me out of the Trial, but now I think she unwittingly gave me a gift. I’m going to get her out of the Guild, and then we’ll both be free to live how we want.”
“The guards will find you before you even set foot in the castle. You may be good in a fight, but you can’t hold them all off on your own.”
“I don’t need to go back to the castle. Mother Illynor isn’t going to kill her—not here, at least. She’ll take Mercy back to the Keep with the rest of the Assassins and take her time torturing her.”
“Good luck.”
“We’ll need it,” she responds with a grim nod. “Before you disappear, I need you to do something for me.”
“Do what?”
Her eyes flash with warning. “Can I trust you?”
“Absolutely,” he breathes. He’s finished creeping about in the shadows, finished plotting and cheating and lying. “Tell me.”
She does. As they stand there, watching the sunset paint the sky over the charred ruins of Sandori, she explains exactly what she needs him to do. When she finishes, Calum casts one last look at his city, at the homes of the people he has betrayed so grievously. Tamriel will never forgive him. He will never forgive himself. He digs his heels into his horse’s side, and it breaks into a trot. After he does her this favor, he doesn’t care where he goes. Perhaps if he rides fast enough, he’ll be able to outrun the demons prowling his mind. Perhaps he’ll be able to forget the sound of Elise’s laugh, the way her eyes lit up when she grinned, the speckles of paint which had always seemed to be covering her hands and caked around her fingers.
Perhaps—but not likely.
“Calum,” Faye calls when he reaches the bottom of the small hill. He tugs on the reins, and his horse slows to a stop. The Assassin cocks her head, a strand of blue-black hair falling free of the braid and into her face, and studies him with a piercing, unwavering gaze. “Everyone deserves a chance to start over. Mine was going to the Guild. Mercy’s was coming here. This is yours. Don’t waste it.”
46
Tamriel
Tamriel forces himself to his feet as the guards hoist his father onto a stretcher, one of them pressing a handful of bloodied bandages to the king’s stomach, and carry him out of the room. Someone had managed to find a surgeon; he can hear the man shouting orders in the great hall.
Tamriel sheathes his sword and runs his hands down his face. Everything—everything had happened so fast. He still can’t make sense of it in his mind. He’d been fighting Drake. Nynev had leapt in front of him, Mercy’s siblings at her side, and held off his cousin’s blade long enough for Tamriel to turn and search for his father in the chaos. He’d found Firesse sprinting toward him, Mercy’s double-edged dagger in her hands, her eyes wide and glimmering with victory and bloodlust. There had been a snarl on her pale lips.
Then something had crashed into his side, sending him tumbling down the steps. There was a yelp of pain. When he’d looked up again, blinking away the stars in his vision, his father was on his knees, a hand pressed to the wide gash Firesse had carved there.
Everything beyond that was a blur.
Somehow, he’d ended up at his father’s side. The king was on his back, coughing and sputtering as hot blood spilled out of his stomach and coated Tamriel’s hands. Firesse had stood over him with those Creator-damned daggers, ready to take his head off.
The next moment, she was dead.
Nynev grabs his arm. “Are you injured?” Dayna and her children are gathered behind the huntress, bloodied and exhausted, but alive. Matthias clutches a gash in his arm, and a nasty bruise has begun to bloom on the side of Cassia’s face. Ino’s expression is impassive, unreadable as always.
He shakes his head. “Mercy?” he asks Ino, hardly daring to breathe.
“Now that Firesse is dead, she’ll live.”
He lets out a sharp breath. “And the rest of you?”
“Nice to see where your priorities lie, Your Highness.” Nynev tries to smile, but it slips. She shakes her head as if to clear it. “Nothing a few strong drinks can’t fix once the war is won.”
Because it’s not over yet, and they all know it. Firesse may be dead, but every Cirisian soldier who had survived the attack has either fled or hidden somewhere in his city. Maybe they’ll lie low for a while, build up their strength, before they strike again at the humans they hate so much. Or maybe they’ll take advantage of the chaos and destroy as many of his people’s lives as they can.
They turn to the room, to the sea of bodies and the thick, dark blood coating . . . everything. A few guards are walking around the room, turning bodies over to see who might still live and who among them had fallen. Tamriel’s stomach clenches. So many of his people lost their lives today, Master Adan among them. Calum might be one of them. His father is somewhere in the castle, barely clinging to life. He shoots a hateful look at Firesse’s body. In death, her delicate features are smooth, relaxed—the face of a girl who was old enough to see how cruel the world is, and young enough to believe she could change it.
“Where is Calum?” he asks, his voice a low growl. He has no idea what he will say when he sees his cousin, but he needs to speak to him, to understand what happened in the days since they left the Islands. When no one responds, he repeats, “Where is Calum?”
“The . . . The guards are looking for him, Your Highness.” Dayna finally answers. She flinches at the anger which sparks in his eyes. The Creator-damned traitor escaped? “An Assassin helped him flee. They left a . . . a trail of bodies outside.”
Tamriel’s hands curl into fists. “I want every spare guard patrolling the streets for the coward. Have messengers sent out to every major town and city—I want him caught and brought to the city for trial. Whoever brings him in will receive a title and lands in the city.” Although he does not have the authority to offer such a reward, he fears he soon will.
Mercy’s mother nods and hurries toward the doors to the great hall, stepping carefully through the blood and around the bodies of the dead. Before she even makes it halfway, she starts and lets out a shriek. “N-Niamh. Niamh is—”
Nynev is gone before she even finishes her sentence. The huntress leaps
off the dais and hurtles across the room, tossing her hunting knives aside as she slips and slides on the slick floor. When she reaches Dayna and the woman slumped beside her, Nynev drops to her knees and cradles her sister’s body to her chest, heaving, wracking sobs shuddering through her.
“Stupid, stupid girl,” she hiccups through her sobs. “Stupid, brave girl.”
Tamriel and the others approach silently. When they surround Nynev and her sister, Dayna leans down and kisses the huntress’s brow before leaving to deliver Tamriel’s orders. The small act of comfort only makes Nynev cry harder.
Cassia kneels beside her, slipping an arm around Nynev’s waist. Tamriel crouches on her other side. Niamh’s body is covered in blood from the countless blows she’d taken to protect him. Her shirt clings to the deep, horrific gash in her left arm and across her stomach—the one which, long ago, had nearly cut her in two. If not for that, she might have lived to see the other side of the war.
“I thought she was going back to the infirmary,” Ino murmurs, his eyes wide in disbelief. Beside him, Matthias steps forward and lays a hand on Nynev’s shoulder. “I thought she was going to get supplies to help the king.” He leans down and pulls a soggy, bloodstained piece of paper from Niamh’s fist. Shock flickers across Nynev’s face when she sees the ancient, swirling script. “Your sister figured out the spell to stop Firesse’s magic. She saved us all.”
Tamriel lays a hand on Nynev’s. “We will never forget her sacrifice,” he vows when her bloodshot eyes meet his. “Never. The people of this city, this country, owe their lives to the Savior of Sandori.”
They’re all silent for a few long minutes—Nynev’s sniffling and the soft scraping of metal armor against the floor as the guards continue to examine the dead filling the quiet—until Matthias whispers, “She’s smiling.”
Born Assassin Saga Box Set Page 112
